Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A personal hell

UPDATE: really rather oddly, since I started writing this blog post, the image I linked to has been removed. I can still find it here for now but this is an annoyingly miniscule version which you can’t read. The version of hell it depicts is being forced to have your astrological chart read to you while eating scotch egg crumbs out of Stephen Green’s beard inside the arse-crack of a ginormous Jeremy Clarkson.

But the lack of the image pretty much makes a mockery of the entire post.

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What’s your idea of a personal hell? A search for something completely unrelated (honest) revealed that Viz had managed to document mine in detail.

This might be pretty impenetrable outside the UK.

Viz is a UK magazine which (mostly) parodies children’s comics by aping the style and sometimes the premise of those comics and adding sex, violence and swearing.

Stephen Green is a fundamentalist Christian and bigot, if that isn’t redundant. And he’s a He doesn’t care who he hurts in his campaign to prove he’s not gay. He protested against Jerry Springer The Opera, which caused a cancer charity to decline a donation from the production. The show promised to donate £10 per ticket from one performance of that show, which would have raised about £3000 for the charity. Green’s organisation didn’t like the fact that they were accepting money from a blasphemous production, so they threatened to picket the charity’s centres. To protect its patients from distress, it was forced to decline the money. There aren’t many levels of being a horrible fucking prick above above that.

Jeremy Clarkson is also a bigot, although not, as far as I know, a Christian one. He likes to propound racist and ignorant views for effect and occasionally gets people in a lather with what he says. I’m not really sure why, the man is a living caricature of himself and the embodiment of someone who doesn’t realise that the joke’s been on him all along. He’s not all bad though: he punched Piers Morgan.

Scotch Eggs are a bewildering concoction of hard-boiled eggs, sausage meat and breadcrumbs, deep fried. They’re not – as far as anyone knows – Scottish and nobody knows why they were allowed to be invented.

So perhaps you can see why this would be my personal hell. But I wasn’t brought up to believe in a personal hell. My parents and teachers all told me that hell was a real place, with actual fire, brimstone and gnashing teeth. It wasn’t conceptual. People – and especially me – would actually go there for an actual eternity. It’s an appalling thing to tell children (or anyone) and I agree with Dawkins that it’s child abuse. Especially given the unbridled glee with which I was told of my undoubted fate.